Music review.

Perlman And Cso Solid But Not Sublime

November 17, 1994|By Dan Tucker. Special to the Tribune.

Monday evening's sold-out benefit concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, with conductor Lawrence Foster and violinist Itzhak Perlman, clearly was a rousing success for its sponsor, the Jewish Community Centers of Chicago. That is the important news for the 35,000 people who benefit each year from the centers' programs and services.

The all-Beethoven program was not quite so successful artistically, at least for those who have heard Perlman and the CSO at their glorious best. Still, Perlman is a masterly musician who always rewards an audience, and the orchestra's technical standards remain high.

As a conductor, Foster is on top of his job. His beat is energetic and precise, and he seems to have clear ideas about what he wants from the orchestra.

If his wants included a pianissimo, though, he didn't get it. Starting with the opening "Egmont" overture, the orchestra produced a sound that was hefty but short on contrast; it could shout, but it never whispered. The dramatic crescendos started from the middle foreground, not from a distance.

The Symphony No. 8 in B-flat is Beethoven being funny, a jolly uncle out to amuse the kids, and it has some great jokes.

The key to them, like most jokes, is unexpectedness-wild leaps to a distant key, octaves bumping up and down and into each other, a spooky little phrase repeated over and over till a fortissimo chord yells "Boo!"

All of this was fun and was played correctly, even well. What was missing was eagerness, the sound you get when an orchestra tends to play at the leading edge of the note instead of the trailing edge.

The difference of microseconds is not detectable to the ear, but it makes the difference in feel between an orchestra that's eager to play and one that just wants to do its job well and go home.

But the orchestra does like Perlman, and his arrival on the stage made a difference.

In the D Major Concerto it gave him alert, supportive playing, and in the second movement Larghetto it went well beyond that; the choir of muted strings sounded the way gold feels. Perlman's singing sound at the close of that wonderful movement was hypnotic.

His playing does not have the overpowering bigness of tone it had, but his artistry is unchanged. In the cadenzas especially, his variety of sound is a marvel. In the florid windup to the last movement, he could at one moment sound like a gleeful country fiddler and the next like a baby's breath. And in Beethoven's long-breathed melodic passages, his tone was like sunlight without the glare.